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Best of the rest

I’ve spent a busy few days pacing the AAPM exhibition show floor. There’s just not room here to include all the new products that I’ve seen, but here are a few more releases that caught my eye:

• Modus Medical Devices of Ontario, Canada unveiled a neat system for turning a standard Catphan phantom into a breathing phantom. Its QUASAR Catphan Shaker can be programmed with patient-specific breathing data (from a Varian RPM) to simulate respiratory motion for quality assurance before treatment. 

According to the data sheet, the Shaker offers an amplitude of up to 30mm for RPM input; or it can move sinusoidally with speeds from four to 60 breaths per minute at 40 mm amplitude. 

• Standard Imaging (Middleton, WI) had a whole host of new products to promote. First up, MIMI - a new phantom for testing the isocentricity of imaging modalities. The MIMI (multiple imaging modality isocentricity) platform can be used for QA of optical positioning systems, kV cone-beam CT, on-board imaging and laser systems.

Next up, new versions of the company’s IMSure QA and PIPSpro software packages. IMSure version 3.1 offers features including Cyberknife verification, support for .decimal compensators and the ability to import DICOM structure sets. Version 4.2 of PIPSpro comes with automated cone-beam CT testing and improved stereotactic accuracy.

Standard Imaging also unveiled its new SuperMAX - a two-channel electrometer with a colour touch-screen interface - as well as an upgraded version of the MAX 4000 electrometer and three new inserts for its Lucy phantom.

• The big push at the Siemens’ booth was ARTISTE, a linac for adaptive radiotherapy. According to Siemens, the system’s key selling point is its "ultimate flexibility", which gives clinicians control over how to treat each patient each day.

ARTISTE features a 160-leaf MLC, claimed to be the fastest on the market with a leaf movement speed of 4 cm/s. "The more leaves you have and the finer resolution, the better you can conform to the tumour and the better you can deliver the dose," Siemens’ product manager Brett Evans told me.

Using this collimator in tandem with the company’s new IM-Confident Plan treatment planning system enables IMRT treatment time to be reduced to less than five minutes, he explained.

Posted by Tami Freeman on July 31, 2008 10:00 AM | Permalink